South Carolina's Greenville Health System (GHS) recently signed an agreement with Agfa HealthCare for its Enterprise Imaging platform.
The suite of solutions will allow it to seamlessly connect its facilities with patient imaging and textual data across the Upstate of South Carolina. Agfa HealthCare's North American headquarters is located right in GHS' backyard, in downtown Greenville.
With Enterprise Imaging, the health system will be able to consolidate medical images and information and streamline hardware and storage capacity while eliminating data silos and strengthening data security.
GHS had an existing relationship with Agfa for medical image management, but is migrating to Enterprise Imaging to not only upgrade its capabilities and replace other vendor's products, but to provide better communication between healthcare providers all along the patient care continuum.
GHS, like most healthcare systems in the United States, faces an enterprise-wide challenge to provide efficient and secure clinical imaging workflow processes and related technologies to a new generation of imaging producers while complying with regulatory standards, enhancing clinical collaboration and reducing the cost of imaging storage. GHS purchased the entire suite of Enterprise Imaging solutions, which include:
Enterprise Imaging Vendor-Neutral Archive (VNA) – consolidates imaging data from multiple systems, departments, facilities and vendors into a central clinical data foundation.
Enterprise Imaging for Cardiology and Radiology
Enterprise Imaging Exchange – allows fast, secure, reliable transfer of patient studies.
Web-based XERO universal image viewer – provides secure access to DICOM and non-DICOM imaging data from different departments and multiple sources, in one view, to clinicians inside and outside of the hospital.
Standardized Departmental Workflows which allow all image-producing service lines to capture and associate imaging studies with an episode of care, with appropriate image descriptors.
With Agfa's platform, clinicians can share imaging data, no matter where they practice medicine. A variety of multimedia and textual information can be captured in a variety of ways across the care continuum and associated with patient encounters – including video and still images.
"Our immediate need was to replace a legacy storage archive system. Rather than solving just that problem and buying only a VNA, we stepped back and took a broader perspective in consideration of patient care operations, organizational growth and strategic support of our population health care model," said Rich Rogers, chief information officer for Greenville Health System.
“Consolidating all of our medical imaging IT systems on a single platform solution that could scale, enable greater clinical efficiency and reduce cost was the right decision for us."
"This relationship means that patients in the Upstate of South Carolina, and in some cases beyond, will benefit from the efficiencies and fast information access that Greenville Health System will realize with Agfa's single platform solution," said Frank Pecaitis, senior vice president, North America Sales at Agfa HealthCare.
"At the other end of the image is the patient, and fast, efficient capture of images and exchange of information will help clinicians, no matter their specialty or location, with that important image transaction to enhance the care of every patient, every day."